


Hope

by via_ostiense



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: F/M, Pre-Het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-11-05
Updated: 2004-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:03:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/via_ostiense/pseuds/via_ostiense
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meet me under the maple tree by the north gate after school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope

Sakuno clutched her bag. She looked around nervously, but no one was in sight yet. Someone had left a note in her desk during the lunch break, but she didn't know who. She hoped she did, though, and hope was fluttering around her lungs, making her breath come short. It had taken her all of the afternoon classes to puzzle out what the note said, because English wasn't her best subject, all the weird verbs and articles were really confusing. But she'd figured it out, or at least she thought it had.  
  
 _Meet me under the maple tree by the north gate after school._  
  
She had been waiting under the maple tree for ten minutes now, but it had taken her fifteen minutes to shake Tomoka and then remember which gate was on the north side of campus - Seigaku was so huge and so confusing, with each of the years assigned to different corridors and getting to her classroom was like navigating a maze, sometimes. She kicked at a rough patch of grass nervously, wondering if maybe he'd given up waiting for her and had gone home. But he'd always waited for her before and he knew how terrible her sense of direction was. Maybe he'd given up because he'd thought that she would at least know her own campus and that a girl who took 15 minutes to make it from the freshman area to anywhere in Seigaku was too stupid for him. Sakuno hunched her shoulders and worried the end of a braid in her hands, even though that always gave her split ends. He wouldn't have done that, right? He was, well, no, maybe he wasn't nice, actually, but if he'd gone to the trouble of slipping a note into her desk and finally signaled that maybe he liked her, that had to mean something, right?  
  
Thirty minutes. Maybe she'd misread the note? Maybe that word meant another tree or it had said south gate or maybe it had said tomorrow after school? She sighed and stood and dusted off her skirt - she'd slowly slipped down the tree until she'd ended up sitting in a small ball, knees to her chest - and reached for her bag.  
  
A hand picked it up first and she looked up, prepared to exclaim or maybe ask nicely if whoever it was would give her back her schoolbag, please.  
  
He looked back at her, a small grin curling his lips.  
  
"Sorry I'm so late," he said, tugging at his cap. "Wait long? I figured it would've taken you at least forty minutes to find your way here." She gasped indignantly - her sense of direction wasn't  _that_  bad! - but he grinned more widely at her and she forgot what she was going to say and blushed.  
  
"C'mon, let's go." He slung his bag over his left shoulder and reached out a hand to her.  
  
"Go?" Sakuno echoed, clasping her hands together. She couldn't look him in the eye. Surely he didn't mean. . .  
  
"It's a date, Saku-chan." His smug smile faltered for a second. "If you want, I mean."  
  
All of her ancestors, God, Amidha Buddha, and Amaterasu were surely smiling upon her right now. She blushed and slipped her right hand into his left, feeling his warmth and his rough tennis calluses rubbing slightly against her smaller calluses. "I'd like that, Ryoma-kun," she whispered shyly.


End file.
